, My first vote was for Eldridge Cleaver, of the Peace & Freedom Party. Or maybe it was the Freedom & Peace Party, who can remember? A quick explanation: I couldn’t bring myself to cast a ballot for either the Vietnam War-supporting Hubert Humphrey or the far more execrable Vietnam War-supporting Richard Nixon, so, Cleaver.
If memory serves, which it sometimes doesn’t these days, Cleaver did not win the presidency in 1968.
But although my preferred candidate lost, and my protest vote made little difference in the results, rather than discouraging me from voting it created in me the desire to vote in every possible election for which I was eligible. That was true whether my preferred candidates were likely to win or not (and most of the time, unfortunately, they did not).
I have voted, then, every time I could, with one exception. In the days before online absentee ballots, I was unable to vote while living abroad. The state of New York, my last U.S. residence, had gotten me my physical absentee ballot too late, and although I rushed it to the American embassy in Paris, they could not guarantee it would be counted.
Now I’m worried that my vote, and the votes of millions of others, also aren’t guaranteed to be counted.
On No Kings Early Voting Day, Oct. 17, I worked my local early voting polling place as a volunteer for the local chapter of Indivisible. It was cold and wet and windy and altogether miserable. And people kept coming, kept braving the weather to vote.
More than twice as many people in my county voted in the early days of early voting than had voted in the comparable period during last couple of midterm elections. After all the demonstrations, after all the clever costumes and angry signs on previous No Kings days, after all the impassioned speeches, here, finally, we had found something we could do that would actually make a difference: cast a vote against corrupt, incompetent, brutal, unlawful fascism. Start the process of accountability.
That trend we saw on Oct. 17 has continued nationwide, according to reports. Americans are voting, despite a series of impediments the Trump administration and affiliated state governments have erected. And the reports also say this Election Day there will be a blue tsunami, that the Democrats will take the House and also could take the Senate. And they will win up and down the ballot, sometimes in places where we never thought that could happen. And that, finally, there will be a check on this unlawful administration and its enablers.
I desperately want to believe all that. I want to believe this administration will not get away with intimidating voters or somehow messing in the election or, most of all, refusing to accept the results. I want to believe all those new electees will be rightfully seated when the time comes and that a reckoning will begin and that our country will return to the rule of law.
But I remember how my vote ultimately didn’t count in 1976. And I remember how, despite my protest vote, there was no reckoning in 1968—and so many times afterward. I await the result of this incredibly important election therefore with hope, but also with a large degree of trepidation. Will our votes count this time?